Acquired - Instagram
Summary
这一期《Acquired》播客由 Ben Gilbert 和 David Rosenthal 主持,深入剖析了 2012 年 4 月 Facebook 以约 10 亿美元收购 Instagram 这桩标志性交易。两位主持人回顾了当时的震撼:一家仅有 13 名员工、没有收入、没有明确变现模式的公司竟值 10 亿美元,这开启了所谓“独角兽时代”。他们强调 Instagram 生于移动时代,以沉浸式、近乎全屏的照片和滤镜抓住了用户注意力,而当时的 Facebook 还深陷 HTML5 移动应用的困境。核心论点是:Facebook 收购 Instagram 并非因为某项技术,而是放下傲慢,押注用户所在的新平台,从而拉开了“应用星座”战略(后续还有 WhatsApp、Messenger、以及对 Snapchat 的报价)的序幕。他们还对比了美国与中国市场,认为微信开创了“增值服务与集成”的全新商业模式,而美国的创新移动产品大多被拥有旧商业模式的大公司收购。主持人也探讨了技术带来的惊人杠杆效应——极少员工服务海量用户,以及“拥有受众入口/渠道”对广告业务的决定性意义。最后他们给这笔交易打了 A+,认为从财务回报(约 35 倍倍数)来看,这可能是科技史上最成功的一次收购。
Highlights
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The even idea that a company that had 13 employees and no revenue and made an app on your phone could be worth a billion dollars was pretty shocking at the time. And totally shocking because there was no discussion of it being worth a billion dollars pre acquisition.
一家只有 13 名员工、没有收入、只是做了一个手机应用的公司竟然能值 10 亿美元,这在当时是相当令人震惊的。而且更震惊的是,在收购之前根本没有人讨论过它值 10 亿美元。
Captures the shock that launched the 'age of the unicorn' -
With 13 employees and 30 million users Instagram had 2.3 million users per employee at acquisition. Pop quiz. How many users per employee do you think Instagram has today? ... 2.6 million users per employee.
收购时,Instagram 有 13 名员工、3000 万用户,相当于每名员工服务 230 万用户。来做个小测验:你觉得今天 Instagram 每名员工服务多少用户?……每名员工 260 万用户。
Striking illustration of technology's leverage -
What Facebook did when acquiring Instagram is set their hubris aside and say we're not the most important platform, the most important thing is our business staying alive, and what we have to do is bet on whatever the thing where the people are on the new platform is.
Facebook 在收购 Instagram 时所做的,是放下傲慢,承认‘我们不是最重要的平台’,最重要的是让自己的业务存活下去,而我们必须押注于用户所在的那个新平台。
The strategic thesis of the whole episode -
In my opinion, WeChat is nothing short of literally the creation of an entirely new major business model for technology companies. And that is the value added services and integrations business model. This product is given away for free, not monetized through advertising.
在我看来,微信简直就是为科技公司创造了一种全新的重大商业模式——即增值服务与集成的商业模式。这个产品是免费提供的,并不通过广告变现。
Bold cross-market claim contrasting the US and China -
Acquired 35x multiple post acquisition on that property alone. Not to mention all the ancillary benefits of potentially steering Facebook as a whole organization in the right direction on mobile. This might be the very best acquisition in technology history.
光是这一项资产,收购后就实现了约 35 倍的回报倍数。更不用说它还带来了引导整个 Facebook 在移动端走上正确方向的附加价值。这可能是科技史上最成功的一次收购。
The episode's emphatic A+ verdict
Full transcript
All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?
So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review where you.
drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lugora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.
And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.
Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at legora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.
Welcome back to episode two of acquired. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal and we are your hosts yet again at least for the second time and hopefully many many more hopefully many more thank you to all of our listeners all few of you for the amazing few bit growing small and number strong and spirit true Thank you for the amazing feedback. It was incredible. We learned a lot. We learned that Ben has amazing idioms. Amazing idioms. David has dulcet tones. Thank you for the feedback. We will try to incorporate it and hope that we keep getting better. If you have more feedback after this one, please send it to us. You can find us on, you can find the show on Twitter at ad acquired FM.
You can find Ben at Gilbert. You can find me, David at DJ Rosent, DJROS ENT, and our website is live at acquired.fm. So, should we introduce ourselves again? We think for the first couple, so people, so, you know, more than our original five listeners get the lowdown. I think we can do it. Just this once. Then once we're viral after episode three.
Then we can stop introducing ourselves. Sounds good. So I'm Ben Gilbert. I am the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs in here in Seattle. We come up with ideas for companies. We prototype them. We build them. We try and get customers. And if it seems to be working, then we recruit really talented people to come in and take the company from us and we go start the next thing.
And I'm David. I am a principal at Madrona Venture Group. We are an early-stage venture capital firm located here in Seattle. Invest in seed series A, series B, stage technology companies. Always looking for the next great thing, which might become the next great acquirer, or maybe a query, hence our podcast. All right, so with that, let's segue into our second episode.
Our first was Disney acquiring Pixar. And here for our second, as another landmark successful, even in the very recent last couple of years, this one's not nearly as old. Landmark successful acquisition Instagram by Facebook. Facebook buying Instagram. So as a quick reminder, the framework that we've decided on for our show is we're going to Briefly talk about the acquisition kind of facts and history, then each of us Ben and I are going to categorize the acquisition into a few buckets that we've identified. And then we're going to do a fun segment called what would have happened had the acquisition not happened. Trust us, it's fun.
And then we're adding a new one for this episode, which is tech themes that we think are illustrated by this acquisition. And then finally, we're going to give the deal as a whole a grade. And we heard the feedback that Ben and I agree too much, so we're going to try and be more controversial here. I'm not though. Yes, you are. All right. Instagram.
I remember vividly this was one of those moments in my technology life at least exactly where I was the day I found out that Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars and Today sitting here in 2015 where there are like 623 unicorn startups out there that are valued at you know more than a billion dollars back in April 2012 They were very, very few and the even idea that a company that had 13 employees and no revenue and made an app on your phone could be worth a billion dollars was pretty shocking at the time. And totally shocking because there was no discussion of it being worth a billion dollars pre acquisition. The only indicator that that number was ever talked about was when the deal was done and announced to the public.
Yep, and interestingly, Instagram raised its, I believe, Series B, round of venture capital just like a week or even less than a week before the acquisition happened and did value it at several hundred million dollars. But all that only came out just right before even during and after the acquisition news, which was...
Pretty momentous really ushered in bed and I've been talking about this for this this acquisition for months It was part of the genesis of the idea of this show this acquisition. I think really ushered in you know quote-unquote the age of the unicorn Yeah, as much as I hate the term it sure does see that way seem that way so quick facts April 2012 Facebook announces that they are buying Instagram company with 13 employees no revenue no obvious monetization model and had 30 million users at the time and interestingly just a week before Instagram had launched their Android app and added 1 million users at that time with 13 employees and 30 million users Instagram had 2.3 million users per employee
at acquisition. Pop quiz. How many users per employee do you think Instagram has today? Well, they've hired a whole bunch of people, right? They have. They have. I think we'll be talking about earlier. They have like 150 employees now. They have about 150 employees, as best as we can tell. I don't know. That number's got to be significantly worse now. It's better. 2.6 million users per employee. Instagram now has...
Two and a half years later, 400 million users. Wow. Huh, okay. So I don't know. I feel like I'm already hinting at my answer to the question later of my rendered conclusion, but you know, this is our second episode. We're still going to the easy ones here. Pretty incredible. Honestly, I think the thing that always amazed me about Instagram was it's so simple. They focus their eyes on the prize and the question is like, you know, We'll get to this a little bit later, but what would have happened to that incredible simple sheltered platform if it wasn't integrated into the Facebook strategy and they were forced to start clawing and scratching for more of that attention that keeps people tied to Facebook. I think the interesting thing that Facebook realized is they're the social fabric. They're necessary.
It was getting to the point, you know, everyone's parents were on Facebook. It became more of a utility in our lives than sort of an escape or an enjoyable thing. And actually, quick aside, it's crazy. I was scrolling back through my history of writing on a friend's wall. And it's this freshman year of college.
And our conversation back and forth on each other's like public Facebook walls look like text messages and they're they're talking about what grades we got in classes and like sort of private stuff that I wouldn't be posting today. It's really fascinating that You know Facebook was was very much that that sort of fun place at that point and not just this thing that we've viewed as kind of necessary and a thing that it could be assumed that pretty much every person would have and you know you see there's a lot of reports of hey kids aren't using Facebook they're just using Instagram they're just using Snapchat they're all using Facebook too but it's for school work I mean it's for the the necessary less fun things in their lives and you know starting with with Instagram and with other actually acquisitions later I mean Instagram is is sort of where you want to hang out and Facebook is where you have to go yep and um you know Facebook
it's so easy to forget now sitting here in 2015 and maybe we'll maybe if we're looking for something funny in 2018 we'll go back and listen to our podcast that we're recording now but it's even so hard to remember like this was only three and a half years ago when this acquisition happened and Facebook was in such a different place from where it is today the company had just recently gone public We've been and I were just talking about this right before the episode. They were still in the whole HTML5 mobile app hell Their apps were buggy. Can you remember that was even a debate? Oh Nightmare and right and like you know now like what is like half of Facebook's revenue if not more?
We haven't we shouldn't make a note to that we haven't fact-checked most of our numbers so we could be wrong here But at least it seems like everything that people talk about with Facebook is their mobile app installs and their CPI ads like I couldn't even do that with HTML5 Remember back, you know people talk about now You know and I think you know Mark Zuckerberg has even said you know that Facebook really made a huge misstep in mobile and and apps like Instagram, like WhatsApp that they would later acquire, like Messenger that they would build within Facebook in the coming years, really stepped in and took over a lot of the value that people were getting out of Facebook from back in the day. It's fun. And it's amazing because Facebook, you know,
Really really killed it on the desktop. There's a lot of different boxes everywhere if you remember There was the mini feed and then there was the wall and then there was apps that you could have installed in superpoke each one superpoke God doing this superpoke There's these boxes. They're sort of floating around all over the place maximizing your screen real estate and when they try to translate that to a mobile experience You know, it's tough to pair down all that stuff when your app has all this incredible functionality Whereas you have Instagram, which is born in the mobile era And I can have a funny story about this. It's born in the mobile era and has these immersive, beautiful, damn near full-screen photographs. And all of my attention is on that one thing at one time. And it was focused on making anybody able to look like a talented creative. Even if we weren't, I mean, I specifically remember one of my early Instagrams was of like the torn up bottom of my jeans and my shoe. And it looks so artsy with a filter. And I couldn't, it was a place where you could show off. That's so emo. Full-screen.
And really, what they did was understand what people's attention span and what people's attention looked like when they were on that platform. And I remember this is not a thing that I came close to understanding at the time because I remember I used to work at a dog patch labs at pure 38.
may at rest in pieces recently been demolished. When you're returning it, co-tweet. At co-tweet, yeah, in San Francisco. It's self-inacquisition. Yeah, yeah. An acquisition and then another acquisition. Yeah, everything becomes sales force eventually. In the enterprise. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm at peer 38 and the guys from Bourbon later Instagram were upstairs working on a pivot from their location-based thing to this.
very simple filter focused upload your photos to a social network app. And I remember seeing a demo of it when I walked by one time and telling Kevin, I'm pretty sure Facebook already lets you upload photos from your phone and everybody's already on that. And that then is why you're not a venture capitalist. We'll leave that to David. But no, I think you know, then what you're saying I think really illustrates, you know, we're gonna talk about themes, you know, as part of our programming in a minute, but I think this really illustrates something critical about why Facebook needed Instagram, and that was engagement. You know, Facebook, before mobile, remember, you know, back when it first launched when I was in college, you were probably in high school when it first launched, right? Yep.
How much engagement did you have with Facebook? It's related to this concept of fun and now Facebook has become this utility and I barely engage with it at all but Instagram and messaging WhatsApp and other services like that have become on mobile these atomized services where your engagement lies and that's the core of driving advertising revenue and Facebook has always been Really good at this strategy where social networking is a cool kids game I mean there's the cool kids go to a thing and then the late adopters come on and then parents come on and then it's boring and then it's built for the old world platform and then it atrophies and it dies and what Facebook did when in acquiring Instagram is is
you know set their hubris aside and say we're not the most important platform the most important thing is our business staying alive and what we have to do is bet on whatever the thing where the people are on the new platform is and you know after they after that critical first step then they can start learning about what makes that so successful and and kind of integrate all of those really talented folks to kind of like teach Facebook how to do that too so that brings us to section number two of our show, what category would you put this acquisition in? People, technology, product, business line, other? It's fine, I was just talking about people, but that's totally second order here. I'm gonna say this is product. The Facebook left it alone. I mean, Facebook did the thing that every other acquireer can't seem to resist in any scenario, and that is saying, oh, you know what this could do? This could make art.
our main product better. And the reason that that product was was dangerous to you and potentially kicking your ass was because they figured something out you didn't and it's been really incredible to watch Instagram have its own evolution and you know I'll be out with some little boosts from you know the Facebook newsfeed and things like that doing some algorithmic priority but it's it's really remained separate a separate team and stayed very true to the court of what they set out to do. I think Everything you said is right. And totally the natural category to put this in is products. But I'm going to be a little bit controversial. I'm actually going to say technology here. And the reason I'm going to say technology is not because of any specific great computer science-based innovation that the Instagram team had. But I'm going to say that this became, as I was talking about,
Really the first piece of Facebook's entire strategy for the mobile technology wave that they missed, that they missed from the beginning. And David, you think that they, sorry, this is, you think that they wouldn't have gotten their act together in making their app what it is today.
Without I mean let's let's look at whether app is today. It's a collection of the most talented iOS developers in the world and a lot of the best mobile designers in the world packed into one office developing Maybe arguably the best suite of apps in the world You just said the critical thing sweet sweet of apps. What is Facebook today Facebook is a suite of apps company Not gonna disagree with you I think without Instagram, without, and it's impossible to know how much of this is Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg and the rest of the Facebook team, core Facebook team strategy versus what's come from Kevin and Mike and the rest of the Instagram team, but I think without that acquisition happening, I think Facebook probably doesn't or make an offer for Snapchat somewhat
a few months or a short time after to buy Snapchat for 3 billion that Snapchat rejected. I think Facebook doesn't buy WhatsApp for the incredible amount of money that it did. And maybe even Oculus to a certain extent. But even more than that, again, think back to April 2012 when Facebook on mobile is this HTML5 mess.
And think about Messenger now to go from that HTML5 mess to the Facebook core Facebook app today which drives a huge amount of revenue through their paid install program, ad program, and then to develop Messenger on the side and then have the guts to rip it out and make it part of this suite of app strategy. You know, Messenger, I believe the latest numbers has 700 million active users.
which is pretty incredible for something that is now fully standalone app. Yeah, so I'll go with you on the technology of Instagram being a kick in the pants, but I don't think, you know, we talk about like what a technology acquisition that is truly about, you know, they understood how to do this computationally difficult thing better than we did, and we needed it to enhance our core product or you know, Apple acquiring the Touch ID company because they could make a differentiated product based on integrating that technology. I think that's a far second order thing here. It's acquiring the product of Instagram. You might be right. You'll get me later. I'll get you later. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture.
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All right, what would have happened if Kevin Sistrim had said no? Yeah, Instagram had just raised $50 million. They had plenty of runway break future ahead of them. Where would we be today? Yeah, you know, I think Instagram as a product to users wouldn't be significantly different.
I think that it would have continued to grow more slowly, because they didn't have the resources. They wouldn't have had the prioritization from, and this is theoretical. This is something we talked about before. Did Facebook really prioritize Instagram posts in the newsfeed algorithm? Probably. I mean, it sort of looked like it. It looked like we had a huge spike in that, and there was probably a lot more Instagram traffic. On the other hand, one of the things I'm still bummed about today is a loyal Twitter user.
Oh man, how great was it when Instagram was natively integrated into the Twitter stream? Yeah, that was pretty cool. And that was a sad, sad day when that integration broke. Totally sad. And actually it changed my behavior. I don't tweet photos on... I don't put a photo on Instagram and then tweet it because I know it's not going to show up. I natively upload it to Twitter now. Yep. And how often do you do that? Every third, fourth...
tweet maybe yeah maybe but but but I'll say I was gonna say all these things negate each other Twitter's at 300 million users and turning out everyone they can bring in turned out a billion plus so far and Facebook's sitting pretty with you know a decent chunk of the world's internet enabled population so I think anything Facebook does is you know a three four X maybe five X force multiplier on top of anything Twitter could do no doubt However, I do think Instagram has become itself a huge driver of audience and 400 million active users added 100 million this year. It's crazy. But I think you can make an argument that they could have continued bootstrapping their way up into that user base through other platforms like Twitter and using Facebook as well. I mean, here's how I think it would be different.
You know, in the last six months especially, Twitter has a, or I'm sorry, Instagram has a very real ad platform. And they took their time in developing it, first a very full-served one, where you'd work directly with the Instagram team, now a self-served dashboard. But you get these really immersive brand ads that are platform appropriate. They don't feel like something that I want to pass. I want to look at it almost as much as I want to look at the gorgeous nature of photography that I see.
They just didn't have the funnel of advertisers to point the ad platform at. So it would have been very slow to try and get advertiser attention and people to come over and use the Instagram platform and not only to spend their dollars there, but to spend their attention, their learning a new platform. Whereas in the Facebook acquisition, they have this kind of dual deployment where you can buy ads on either from a single ad dashboard, much like Google did very early on with YouTube.
So I'm going to go in a little bit kind of out there crazy direction with this. And this is pure speculation. But I think if this acquisition hadn't happened, you know, I mean, like I was talking about earlier, this kicked off the era of the constellation of apps, you know, with Facebook and with, you know, Twitter buying Vine. And you've got even Instagram itself now between boomerang that they just launched and hyperlapse and layout. Yep.
which kudos to the Instagram design team, the cohesiveness of those is really nice. So, let's imagine, though, for a second that this constellation of apps thing hasn't become a theme in the technology landscape over the past couple years. Well, it's really interesting because it has. You now have all of these major social platforms that have been created over the past five years with the exception of SnapChat. All of the US new domestic US-based social platforms are owned by other companies with other business models and other goals. And if you think about the level of business model innovation that's happened at this mobile app layer,
in the US and compare it to Asia and WhatsApp. Now, it's pretty bold claim to say the acquisition of Instagram prevented the rise of WhatsApp, like business models in the US. But let's just, you know, play this out for a minute. Sorry, now, what's a WeChat?
Apologies, so I meant we chat. Yeah, as a quick aside for listeners, if you haven't been reading up on WeChat, it is insane. Absolutely insane. It's on the surface a messaging app, but it's effectively like an operating system where it's much easier for especially non-technical folks to build a plugin for their business to WeChat that enables all sorts of things from booking doctors appointments to picking your kids up at school all within this theoretical. In my opinion, we chat is nothing short of literally the creation of an entirely new major, major business model for technology companies. And that is the value added services and integrations business model. Before we chat, this is, I mean, it's amazing. This product is given away for free, not monetized through advertising. And still,
In China, which is a brutally competitive market where it is very hard to monetize users this product has I believe the latest estimates are like a $7 are poo annual revenue per user in China more I think more than Twitter and rivaling Facebook and those are ad platforms exactly And that is pretty incredible and what and so what I think is amazing is Because in the US you've had these new Innovative mobile products be acquired by larger companies with older established business models you haven't seen that happened in the US as much now there are lots of other factors you know like in China there was no You know mobile was really the first computing platform to be widely adopted across the whole population. There was no legacy desktop
Product and technology layer like there was in the US that certainly had a lot to do with it too But imagine, you know, what type of business model innovation we might have seen had Instagram remained independent. I don't know And certainly Snapchat is playing with it too in terms of constellation of apps in terms of business models. Yeah, yeah Yeah, they're their channels thing will be really interesting to watch play out all right listeners Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is no longer the hard part. Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern, like the risks are real.
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What we've talked about this a bunch already, but for you Ben, what kind of broad themes and technology does the Facebook, Instagram, acquisition kind of represent for you? Yeah, so I was thinking about this when you sent me earlier your idea to do the new segment. It's trying to think, I think you did a really nice job in the last segment kind of bringing in the app constellation theme. I think the other theme that this sort of opens up is that you really have to own the audience. And that sounds trivial and obvious at first, but I think what I mean by that is in any distribution channel you have suppliers, you have distribution, and then you have the audience. And with the rise of these services, it's becoming increasingly more important to own the default channel that the users go to.
for leisure, for distraction, for whatever it is, because in the, you know, near infinite nature of the internet, you can push whatever you want through that channel to reach that audience. And I think Facebook's core asset was, and still sort of is being that core place where people want to go and want to The first thing you want to do when you open your phone, when you have some downtime or whatever it is, you go there to be distracted. You go there for fun, you go there to see your friends, to see whatever you aspire to. And that owning the channel makes you the most powerful advertising platform in the world. And on top of that, it makes you the most powerful a lot of other things in the world. I mean, we're...
We're seeing it now with Facebook Instant Articles and other experiments that we're playing with, but you can... You there are a very, very powerful force in your business model and to other people's business models, if you are the first step in dishing out who gets the attention after you. And I think Facebook saw that as an incredible, dangerous threat of people wanting to look at Instagram instead of us, and then they can start shoving whatever they want in that feed. Even though that's kind of Instagram's model is to not clutter it up, they've managed to do a really nice job of taking that attention that they're getting as the front door of what you want to go look at.
And putting that where advertisers are appropriately, putting their... I think this is one of the reasons why technology companies with advertising business models have become so much larger in terms of size and reach and revenue and value than old world advertising models. I started my career steeped in old world media and advertising you know I worked in in media technology and media investment banking and then I worked at a newspaper at the Wall Street Journal and But but I worked with in when I was in banking I worked on Television and cable networks a lot and and their content and distribution were separate You know the distribution companies were the cable companies in the satellite companies and they owned the distribution pipe and the content companies were the cable networks
the AMC's, the scripts, all the channels that you see on cable TV. And those were two separate things. And they both had their own advertising. They shared the advertising pie, those two stages of the value chain. And although television advertising was, and perhaps still might be larger than web digital based advertising as a whole no one company could become as big as a as a Google or as a Facebook has because Google and Facebook have or at least Facebook has integrated and through Instagram integrated content and distribution within one single company within one single app or a constellation of apps yeah they are the channel and Facebook is the channel for where you go when you want social or downtime or
You know the variety of other services that Facebook offers events and messaging all that yeah Google is is where you go when you have intent So for me I think you know we've talked about a few things throughout the episode You know we mentioned briefly technology waves, which is something that Ben and I talk a lot about This concept we should do a whole episode we should do a special episode on on waves, but you know the concept that In the tech world there are these waves of technology that come every few years and I think this is a perfect illustration of the wave of mobile coming and and washing over the desktop wave but bringing with it a whole new
a whole new set of companies, of content and product models, of business models that may or may not have been implemented at least domestically. But that's one. And then the other one that I think is something I've been thinking about a lot lately in terms of technology themes, I think is the scalability and the leverage that technology gives you. And I'm thinking in particular about The number of employees at Instagram. I mean, this is just incredible. 13 employees with 30 million users. Oh, and on those 13 employees, we were looking on LinkedIn too. I think 11 are still at Instagram. Yeah, something crazy like that, which is not typical for technology. Yeah, yet another example of Facebook doing an acquisition. Doing a great job here. But 13 employees at this landmark acquisition and today, even at roughly 150,
for 400 million users, and it's impossible to know how much revenue Instagram is generating today, but there was a great equity research report put out by City Group a year ago, almost a year ago, which they valued Instagram at $35 billion. And this was when Instagram had not quite 300 million users. What's Facebook's market cap? I don't know offhand, I want to say it's right around 200 billion.
Yeah, so I mean, that's what a ridiculous chunk, right, acquired for a billion dollars. It was less back then. Right, right. And in that report, they estimate that...
Instagram revenues are could be on the order of about two billion dollars. I mean, that's incredible. This year, right? 20 I think it was maybe summer 2015 to 2016 or something like that. Yeah, this this year they estimate last year City Group estimated two billion in revenue for Instagram this year in 2015 To do that with 150 employees is incredible and then and then what's that which you know came later? Something like 50 some odd employees acquired for 20 plus billion dollars. I would I'll raise the flag here and say not really fair to do the the revenue calculation for the ad network since they're piggybacking off of Facebook's ad network and I'm sure that takes a lot of engineers. True true but I think about the leverage that is possible with technology and technology companies versus again old world media where where I spent time earlier in my career I mean nowhere
Near that kind of leverage that you can get All right, let's wrap up conclusion time conclusion time so acquired for a billion dollars December of last year, you know externally valued at 35 billion even ignoring the the fact that that's based on you know, there's to two billion dollars in revenues this year. This is like not Grasping at straws. This is a very real revenue product and in fact when it was acquired I don't think it had revenue They had no ad platform. They had no nothing pretty incredible what they've done since acquired 35x multiple post acquisition on that property alone Not to mention all the ancillary benefits of of potentially steering Facebook as a whole organization in the right direction on mobile. I mean do I get a plus? It's an a plus I was
I know we need more disagreement on this show, but man, A plus for me too. This might even be the very, from a, from a multiple return standpoint, even to straight financial returns. This might be the very best acquisition in technology history. I'm curious, is there ever, what is, how small of a scale do you have to go down to to get something that was a 35 X multiple in three, is it three years? I mean, bungee, perhaps.
four shadow in that'll be an interesting episode by the way listeners if you have requests suggestions comments thoughts as we said but if you could think of companies we haven't that we haven't please send our way we'd also love to have some guests on this show and by send our way there's Twitter there's also a little feedback form on our site where you can submit stuff we'd also love to have guests if you have a particular insight into a a great technology acquisition in history. Either you were part of it directly or you worked on it as part of a third party and you want to be on our show, shoot us a new. I think we're about done. Alright, thanks everyone. We'll see you next time. Alright listeners, now is a great time to talk about one of our
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